What’s in a sustainability impact report? – article

With the impact of climate change ever present in the news, and sustainability increasingly top of mind, consumers are taking a closer look at brands and the products they are buying. The expectation is on manufacturers to up their game on sustainability initiatives, with 46% of consumers ranking brands as the most responsible for making progress on sustainability, according to the NIQ 2023 Sustainability Report. This pressure on brands is felt across the supply chain and ultimately starts with the availability of sustainably sourced ingredients.

Ingredient company Ciranda knows this well. Founded in 1994 on the belief that organic is better for people and planet, the company has continuously supplied brands and manufacturers with the highest quality USDA certified organic and non-GMO ingredients. With a focus on sustainable and fair-trade practices, each year, Ciranda sources more than 50 million pounds of high quality organic, regeneratively grown, non-GMO and fair-trade ingredients from around the world. The company’s mission, “We create connections that nourish life,” aims to “connect brands with ingredients that inspire change, promote well-being and positively impact our relationships with each other and the planet.”

This year, the employee-owned company decided to take this mission and its commitment to sustainability and transparency one step further by producing its first sustainability impact report. “As a company, we wanted to take a closer look at what we do and where we can have the biggest impact for people and the planet,” says Joe Rouleau, head of sustainability at Ciranda.

Where to start

Ciranda worked together with third-party certifier and auditor NSF Sustainability Consulting Group to help define the company’s dedication to sustainability through three crucial pillars and subsequently land on 11 overarching initiatives. These efforts included a materiality assessment to benchmark Ciranda’s ESG efforts as well as interviews with key stakeholders—employees, customers, partners and certifying bodies—to determine high-priority issues. Ultimately, these findings landed on defining the company’s ongoing dedication to sustainability through three key ESG pillars: Supply Chain Transparency, Environmental Sustainability and Community Enrichment.

“We know what we should be working on, but we brought in the experts at NSF to make sure we didn’t miss any key pieces of importance and to ensure we are using best practices that line up with regulatory changes that are coming,” says Rouleau. Noting that Ciranda is a relatively small company, Rouleau underscores that in establishing 11 focus initiatives that are divided across the three pillars, the company had to be realistic. “You can’t take on everything. We had to look at where are we going as a company, where customers depend on us most and which goals would allow us to have the most impact.”

Through the assessment and interviews with stakeholders, Rouleau shares that people kept referring to “regenerative” and “climate.” And while Ciranda was looking to answer what the company was doing to mitigate and measure its impact on the planet, Rouleau says they also had to look at all the stops in the supply chain from the soil in farmers’ hands to transportation and warehousing to the point a product gets to you or me as finished goods. “We had to identify all the challenges in each of the operating areas from our backyard to around the world.” He adds, “Though our goals were developed based on the most important and material topics to our stakeholders, we also remain committed to aligning our work with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), illustrating our holistic approach to sustainability.”

Sustainability from the ground up

In deciphering what to focus on in the impact report, Rouleau emphasizes the importance of Ciranda’s third pillar, Community Enrichment. “When you look at initiatives and solutions, don’t get tunnel vision and only think about the planet. It’s critical to think about the people.”

This third pillar focuses on leading with integrity to cultivate meaningful impacts in the lives of Ciranda’s stakeholders through its community and global efforts. These efforts include increasing support for sustainability training and the company’s volunteering programs, calibrating the company’s community giving policy and elevating advocacy and industry involvement. “Community enrichment is what brings us all to work and it’s the essence of why we do what we do. It’s where you really learn about the impacts and stories that come from producing sustainable products across a transparent supply chain.” Rouleau recalls a meeting with about 3,000 organic farmers represented in the Philippines, where he heard firsthand the different impacts that Ciranda’s support of organic and fair trade had on the communities with which the company works. “One young woman explained how she was able to go to college and now has an MBA only because of the extra money her family earned from farming certified organic ingredients for us.”  

Ciranda’s history in elevating the integrity of USDA organic certified ingredients, its focus on local community as an employee-owned company and global communities working with small shareholder farmers, as well its more recent work toward Regenerative Organic Certification, all helped define the report’s focus.

“Supply chain transparency is critical to an ethical and transparent supply chain. And certifications like USDA organic play a key role in our environmental sustainability initiatives because they provide some teeth that people can lean into. Organic is the strongest certification with federal oversight, while ROC brings in more of the social part and, where applicable, animal welfare, too.”

The report outlines how supply chain transparency focuses on enhancing compliance and monitoring systems to meet critical regulations and address the safety and wellbeing of the company’s supply partners. This is done through using clean and honest labels, completing Ciranda’s Sedex Members Ethical Trade Audit (SMETA) 4-pillar audit and completing SMETA audits or equivalent for 90% of ingredients sourced by Ciranda by 2026. This pillar also addresses supply chain risk mitigation with a focus on updating the company’s supplier code of conduct, assessing supply chain risks and ensuring ethical trade partnerships.

The environmental sustainability pillar further focuses on shepherding a regenerative world through collaborative action in climate, biodiversity and water management. This pillar focuses on partnerships and advocacy, ingredient life cycle analysis, greenhouse gas assessments and emission reduction initiatives along with waste reduction and diversion. Through this pillar, the company will continue to evaluate new certifications and memberships, such as Regenerative Organic Certification.

In establishing initiatives for the report, Rouleau again emphasizes using discretion as to what you think you can take on and achieve. “You need to have a plan and a budget, and a third-party consultant can help serve as a sounding board. All of this is key, because the process of committing to sustainability initiatives can be overwhelming,” he says. At the same time, he adds, doing nothing is not the answer. “Just do something. If everyone works on something, it’s better than sitting back and thinking about it. And once you have a baseline, the process can keep evolving.” With a framework now established, Ciranda plans to continue to document how it is evolving through annual sustainability reporting and continued initiatives to improve the lives of people across the planet.